[In response to the 9/11 attacks]… the United States would set off a series of wars, conflicts, insurgencies, and burgeoning terror movements that would transform significant parts of the Greater Middle East intofailedor failing states, and their cities and towns, startling numbers of them, into so muchrubble.

Needless to say, that was not the dream! What George W. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had in mind was the “friendly” occupation of Iraq (and its oil), leading inexorably to the downfall next of Assad’s Syria and then of theocratic Iran.

Instead, a victory-less “permanent war” across the Greater Middle East came home to America, with the militarization of its police forces, the rise of the national security state, and the emergence of a terrorist adversary that even the world’s greatest military could not crush. All of this set the stage for con man extraordinaire Donald J. Trump and his winning electoral message of “America First,” which Engelhardt suggests actually means “a country walled off and walled in”.

Think of the road traveled from 2003 to 2017 as being from sole global superpower to potential super-pariah.

But it also means the “blowback wars” are only going to get worse, with a proposed $54-billion-dollar Pentagon budget increase and the “revving up [of] American military power in Yemen, Syria, and potentially Afghanistan” by the Trump administration.

Categories

Email updates

The Russian [nuclear] modernization program was spurred by the US withdrawal, under President George W. Bush in 2002, from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Moscow had for four decades regarded as a central pillar of strategic stability. Moscow’s subsequent failure to reach a new agreement with the United States on missile defenses, and the collapse […]